March 19, 2013

In another exclusive interview with Singularity Hub, Ray Kurzweil provides an update about his first two months as Director of Engineering at Google. During the interview Kurzweil revealed that his team is collaborating with other groups at Google to enable computers to understand and speaking language just like humans.

Kurzweil also tells us how Larry Page personally recruited him to join Google to pursue the goal of creating machines that can think and reason like the human brain.

Speaking with Singularity Hub Founder Keith Kleiner, Ray explained that ”My project is to get the Google computers to understand natural language, not just do search and answer questions based on links and words, but actually understand the semantic content. That’s feasible now.” To successfully do this will involve employing technologies that are already at Google like the Knowledge Graph, which has 700 million different concepts and billions of relationships between them.

His team will also develop software as part of a system that will be “biological inspired” and can learn in a way analogous to the way the human brain is designed, that is, in a hierarchical structure. [...]

Comments (8)

I think the interviewer is rushing the arrival of strong AI just a bit. For a computer to really converse as well as a human, which is what I think Alan Turing’s vision was, there are plenty of massive problems that still need to be solved, and it’s probably not going to happen in just one project, or even a dozen for that matter.

find a good interviewer- it’s an art- not just a mic in front of a willing person. Good god. The internet has driven the art of the interview back about 75 years. I have written about how to– not to post here.

You seem to be arguing that quality is more important than quantity.
I believe that notion is wrong. Quallity and quantity are equally important.
The interview (which you dislike) may be of low quality, but I think given enough time (for the world to figure out how to optimally use the Internet and IT in general, and take advantage of IT’s wondrous ability to give people instant access to almost infinite knowledge, computer-enabled special effects and so on), the “quality interview” you desire will become mainstream on the Internet.

In part, I think, it is scope and coherence of the view of future possibilities that Ray Kurzweil shares with us, the over-arching unity of viewpoint that comes from maturity and years of work and accomplishment and writing, that bring that sense of excitement, hope, and direction to what is perhaps otherwise a bewildering avalanche of scientific, technological, and social innovations pouring forth today.

Mr. Kurzweil is literally one of two people who hands down have my undivided attention every time I see him speak. furthermore he is the only person that gives me a sense of excitement about the future and where technology is going.